Best Performance Processor: Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition

Intel's Extreme Edition processor line (which currently runs on motherboards that feature the Intel X99 chipset and the so-called "v3" iteration of the LGA 2011 socket) has long been on the leading, bleeding edge of consumer-accessible CPU performance. This year's alpha-dog processor, the 10-core Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, is no exception, breaking new ground in many of our benchmark tests. That's thanks to its ability to tackle a monstrous 20 simultaneous computing threads when running software that can make use of Intel's thread-doubling Hyper-Threading technology.

If you really need all the processor performance you can get—for tasks like professional 4K video editing or crunching massive data sets—the Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition is the current chip to get. But there's another "Extreme" about it: It's also extremely expensive, at roughly $1,600 to $1,700.

If you can live with a couple fewer cores, the eight-core Core i7-6900K is worth considering, too, as it costs about $600 less, and it actually has a higher base clock speed of 3.2GHz, versus the 3GHz of the costlier chip. To our eyes, if this Top 100 category also factored in the larger question of value for money, we'd give the award to the Core i7-6900K. The Core i7-6950X is a true beast, but it's just as truly expensive.

Why we picked it...

Senior Editor Matt Safford wrote "...if you're building a new workstation for serious high-resolution video editing, VR content creation, or other time-intensive computing tasks that will benefit from all the cores and threads a modern computer can muster, the Core i7-6950X is certainly worth considering. But even there, be sure that in your daily work, a little extra performance is worth paying a lot extra for. Because at just one step down the processor stack in the Broadwell-E line, you should be able to pick up an eight-core Core i7-6900K that runs at a higher base clock speed and has all the same features for about $600 less.

"So be sure it's worth your while, and your budget, to spend that additional $300 each for the couple of extra cores. They will be the costliest ones, on a per-core basis, that you ever fork over money for."

Who should buy it?

As noted in the quote above, this is a wildly expensive chip that's worth shelling out for only if you spend lots of your professional time waiting around for CPU-based tasks to finish. So consider this chip if you're a time-constrained pro content creator, a researcher churning through data that doesn't benefit from the highly parallel architectures of the GPUs in cards like the Nvidia Titan X, or cost isn't really an object for you and you just want the most powerful consumer processor you can buy. Otherwise, its one-step-down sibling is the better deal.